The Week We Searched For- July 18, 2011

Google’s awesome Q2- Google reported[1] revenues of $9.03 billion for Q2 last week, representing a 32% growth year over year. Here are the details from Google's press release:

Google Sites Revenues – Google-owned sites generated revenues of $6.23 billion, or 69% of total revenues, in the second quarter of 2011. This represents a 39% increase over second quarter 2010 revenues of $4.50 billion.

Google Network Revenues – Google’s partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $2.48 billion, or 28% of total revenues, in the second quarter of 2011. This represents a 20% increase from second quarter 2010 network revenues of $2.06 billion.

International Revenues – Revenues from outside of the United States totaled $4.87 billion, representing 54% of total revenues in the second quarter of 2011, compared to 53% in the first quarter of 2011 and 52% in the second quarter of 2010.

Paid Clicks – Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our AdSense partners, increased approximately 18% over the second quarter of 2010 and decreased approximately 2% over the first quarter of 2011.

Cost-Per-Click – Average cost-per-click, which includes clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our AdSense partners, increased approximately 12% over the second quarter of 2010 and increased approximately 6% over the first quarter of 2011.

TAC – Traffic Acquisition Costs, the portion of revenues shared with Google’s partners, increased to $2.11 billion in the second quarter of 2011, compared to TAC of $1.73 billion in the second quarter of 2010. TAC as a percentage of advertising revenues was 24% in the second quarter of 2011, compared to 26% in the second quarter of 2010.

Google Plus reaches 10 million users- Google CEO Larry Page confirmed[2] earlier rumors during the company’s quarterly earnings announcement on Thursday that its new social networking site Google Plus has reached over 10 million users. Page also stated that the site’s 10 million plus members share over 1 billion items a day.
Pew Research releases new data on the smartphone market- Pew Research Center released[3] a new report last week as part of its Internet Project, which is dedicated to documenting how smartphone and internet technology impacts our lives. According to their latest research, which surveyed 2,277 adults nationally, 87% of smartphone owners access the internet or check their email on their device at least once a day. 25% reported that they access the internet more often from their smartphone device than from a PC. Microsoft’s new social search engine (RUMOR)- Microsoft seems to have leaked what appears to be a new social search network, nicknamed Tualip. The details of the service were found on a Microsoft owned domain, Socl.com, and were quickly swapped for the following message: "Thanks for stopping by. Socl.com is an internal design project from a team in Microsoft Research which was mistakenly published to the web. We didn't mean to, honest," reports[4] Mashable.
Blogs to check out:

Is Google Panda Munching on Ad Revenues?-[5]Google report incredible Q2 earnings, but why? Ryan Singel from Wired.com asks the questions to what extent Google’s Panda updates are responsible for Google’s stellar earnings report and for the growing discrepancy between Google sites’ revenue and that of their partner sites.

Google adds achievement badges to Google News[7] – Geoff Duncan has the latest on Google’s new Google News Badges, which will enable users to earn badges for reading articles on a specific topic and share their achievement with their social circle.